Posted
by
kdawson
on Saturday April 17, 2010 @10:33PM
from the anti-midas-touch dept.

theodp writes "Microsoft's Kin mobile phone project came under fire as Consumer Reports and others pointed out that a promotional video looked like an inappropriate endorsement of 'sexting,' prompting a quick edit and an apologetic tweet. 'The video,' observed Consumer Reports, 'includes a downright creepy sequence [beginning around 0:33] in which a young man is shown putting a Kin under his shirt and apparently snapping a picture of one of his naked breasts. The breast is then shown on the phone's screen, just before the guy apparently sends it to someone. Next we see the face of a young woman, seemingly the recipient, with an amused expression...'"

As mentioned elsewhere, male breasts are generally not considered a private part, regardless of who they are attractive for.

Which is clearly a cultural and societal double-standard that topfree-rights advocates oppose. Of course back in my day, males didn't have breasts, they had pecs.Lets use this example: Is a pierced male nipple somehow less sexual than a pierced female nipple, purely because a man can display his chest freely? The result and motivation for the wearer is arguably the same regardless of gender or sexual preference. Sexy is whatever gets you hot, not what a ratings board or a family advocate group says.

You can pretend the US is some how leagues above everyone else in freedom but it doesn't make it true. You're less likely to see women walking on the beach topless in the US, you're more likely to get sued (in fact lawsuits the subjects of numerous TV shows), you're more likely to be attacked for holding different religious beliefs, especially if you believe in no god.

Sure Europe has twats, like Nick Griffin, crying about their rights being trampled on but the mere fact he can hang out with the David Duke, hasn't been stopped for his comments on Muslims and has been allowed to even participate in politics says to me that European free speech is doing fine.

Gun laws aren't even as restrictive as some Americans make out. Very few countries ban guns out right. Even the NRA has stated that, for instance, 10% of Austrians own hand guns compared to 16% of Americans. http://www.nraila.org/Issues/Articles/Read.aspx?ID=72 [nraila.org]

I do support the freedom to own guns and don't think own even automatics should be completely out of the question (though it should be quite hard to get them) but I understand why the laws exist and in a free society if vast majority do agree with the laws then where is the issue with the law? Some people value things differently. The Japanese may think the US is odd for not having public baths but that doesn't necessarily make the US wrong (or right).

There are some limits to freedom of speech just as there are some limits in the US and every other country. Europe is by no means perfect but the US certainly isn't either and it isn't

If not, I have news for you. Every phone that has ever advertised that it is easy to take pictures is a phone that has advertised the exact same thing. Unless, of course, the process of sending those pictures has been some arcane ritual that can only take place on the third minute of the seventh hour the day after your first born takes its first breath. Which is probably not the case.

What you take pictures of and how easy it is to take them are separate issues. If it is easy to take a

Everyone* on the planet has breasts and nipples. The two types of trouser monster are distributed half and half*. Everyone* who's undergone puberty has sex, usually for fun. One day everyone's naked pictures and sex stories will be on the internet and no one will care anymore, it might put a bunch of celebrity papparazi out of business because no one's career will be ruined because of naked videos or pictures because it wont be a big deal. Eventually.

Yeah but me committing mass murder with a tactical nuke in FO3 is perfectly OKAY! I'll be over here, beating my head against the door frame. Maybe when I pass out and wake up, things will make sense. Or I'll be brain damaged...I think that's win-win!

Let's not forget the Disney's High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens [wikipedia.org] who posed for a nude picture that she lost control of and got leaked. While this led to a scandal in 2006, she seems to have recovered her career and become a non-Disney-clean actress.

No shit. Considering how often we hear about porn moving technology, how big 'The Valley' is, and so forth, can we please shed this neo-Puritanical bullshit in the US?

Guess what: normal, healthy people like to fuck. Normal, healthy people (especially men) like to look at other normal, healthy people. Just because your version of the FSM said it was all "eww, icky, gross" does not mean the rest of us should suffer.

That rule is for Jews only, like the rule against eating milk with meat. A gentile can eat a cheeseburger, or wear cotton-poly blends, without being unrighteous.

The milk rule has to do with a verse in Exodus listing some religious rituals Jews were commanded to perform and others that that were forbidden. One of the forbidden rituals was boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk. Aside from considerations of cruelty, 20th Century archeology discovered that the Ugarites, one of Israel's neighbors, practiced precisely such a ritual.

The prohibition against seething a kid in its mother's milk prevented the incorporation of this foreign ritual into Jewish life. Later, when that law was no longer needed, it was reinterpreted to forbid mixing milk and meat at all, even though each was allowed separately. It was a commandment, and since there is no mechanism for repealing a divine law, the Jews had to find a way to obey it. The prohibition on mixed fibers is probably of the same nature. It probably addressed a specific threat of cultural assimilation or religious syncretism.

The function of many of the commandments of Jewish religious law seems to be maintaining a distinct Jewish cultural identity. If the Pentateuch were still open to additions today, they'd probably add a prohibition against Jews setting up live trees in their house. To us, the intent would be clear: Jews should not let Christmas holiday practices creep into their culture. Two or three thousand years from now, long after people stop setting up Christmas trees, that prohibition might seem weird and arbitrary.

In an ironic way, it is the arbitrariness of such a law that justifies it. The entire point is to prevent the Jewish people from assimilating into the cultures that surround them. Laws against killing or bearing false witness are sensible laws for anyone, but were all Jews to follow only such laws, it would be doubtful that Jews would maintain their distinct cultural identity for thousands of years more.

Here is the thing. It would be nice if we in the US were not so afraid of bodies. OTOH, this is changing. There was a time not so long ago when we could not show a woman wearing a bra on TV. Now women's bodies are becoming less of a taboo, but men's bodies seem to be almost as much as taboo. With this the case, it seems as if there is some sort of objectifying going on rather than just the depiction of the natural form. It would be different if both genders were parading around in skivvies.

Yeah that ad was pretty harmless. In fact, I was surprised at how generally wholesome it seemed. A bunch of kids dancing to pleasant pop'ish song. Speaking of which, does anyone know what song that is? I rather liked it.

The puritans seem to have a contradiction between "Protect the kids from the Registered Sex Offenders(tm)" and the fact that religious leaders who are sex-starved by their jobs seem to have a high rate of becoming Registered Sex Offenders(tm).

The anti-child-porn laws of the Republican error er, era are now untouchable because of the "think of the children" defense, but are clearly leading to over protection that doesn't let kids grow up until they're 18... at which point all of their protections lapse and t

All cool new phones are expected to be what the teens want, working age people are told to use Blackberry or other business-aimed PDA/Phones, and grandparents are lucky if they can understand the Jitterbug.

Seriously? Is people who think like this a large enough fraction of their market base that they actually feel like they have to appease them?

The only reason to defend sexting is if you like child pornography. You aren't a... pedophile... are you?

I mean, think of the children.

The children know that Freedom is what we believe in our hearts to be morally right! And we here in America love our freedom, no matter what some experts would like us to believe! After all, 9/11 happened because they hated our Freedom, so anyone that can't think of the children might as well be terrorists. It's about Family Values.

Family, Faith and Freedom are what separate us and make us the greatest nation in the world!

Why? Have you ever heard the saying "all publicity is good publicity?"

I'm not going that far, but for creating a "controversial" ad likely on the cheap they have half the Internet talking about it and their product, one way or another. My exposure to the Kin is now one TV commercial and one Internet conversation on Slashdot. One cost them a little money and one was completely free.

I don't know if it was intentional. I doubt it matters. The reality is they just got hundreds of thousands of dollars o

I mean it wouldnt be something I do, but both persons involved seem to be grown-ups, in a perfectly concious state, and it seems to be funny to both (for whatever reason). To me the complete scene is as cryptic as the idea why i would buy a phone from Microsoft; maybe this is just to show that the phone does not have real features going beyond an arbitrary cameraphone from 5years ago (but *with touch*). Overall the video seems to aim at people around 25 i would say.

So i dont understand if that is "sexting", i dont understand what the word exactly means (it seems diffuse), i dont see why i would complain about adults (male or female) sending pictures of breasts to other adults (as long as both sides are fine with it). But i think nodoby should complain by depicting seemingly funny things in an advertisement, even if the people in it act highly irrational.

I am actually more annoyed by advertisments still exhibiting old gender role models.

I am sure that it is part of the advertising plan to be "forced" to withdraw sensational ads as a way of gaining extra publicity. I have never seen this ad, and only once heard about the Kin phone, but now I have been exposed (oh dear) to the campaign as a news item.

I am sure that if nobody complained then the ad executives would plant their own complaints in the news just to get people to talk about it. How many times do you hear news reports about people being outraged without ever saying who those people are. I imagine that it is rare to need to resort to doing their own complaints, because the people who get offended by this are so predictably vocal. And who cares if you piss them off, because the target market are young people who think sexting is OK and who would be quite happy to rebel against the prudes.

I am sure that it is part of the advertising plan to be "forced" to withdraw sensational ads as a way of gaining extra publicity. I have never seen this ad, and only once heard about the Kin phone, but now I have been exposed (oh dear) to the campaign as a news item.

That's exactly what I thought. As far as I can tell it was ONE blogger who only said that there was something a bit creepy about the ad. Nobody would have noticed or cared until MS publicly withdrew the ad and apologized, at which point every

This product's entire line of advertising has rubbed me the wrong way. When I first saw an ad for a Kin online, I didn't yet know what it was. All I saw was your typical dating-site ad woman accompanied by a caption saying "Could you be friends with someone you don't even know?" So my first impressions? That it was a dating site. I don't see future advertisements getting much better.

I'm impressed that their phone can focus that close. The original iPhone has a minimum focusing distance of about 1 meter. Later autofocus versions get down to 10cm. Does the Kim camera have autofocus? They don't mention it.

Creepy? Really? What exactly is 'creepy' about it?Unless you mean 'likely to make a large section of the population feel uneasy because they've been cowed into a pathetic state of guilt and self-censorship in the face of a narrow-minded and hypocritical moral hysteria of a small minority'. Yeh you're right, that is creepy.

Showing the pleasure you cannot have with an ipad.
The world has moved to an audio and visual level and expects it anytime, anywhere.
We have the software, hardware and bandwidth, so lets have fun.
Why wait for a US telco or "Jobs" to understand that people like to reach out and relate in both the visual and emotional?.
MS could have done it in a more nudge nudge way, but when has MS ever really understood marketing beyond a tool of market control.
But for buzz and a way better than Apple hardware offereing - a real win:)

A young guy's bare titty! Oh, my god, save me from Satan's hordes! Will somebody please tell fundamentalcase Americans and all the castrated, ass-kissing business drones who are afraid of them to go fuck themselves? Nobody seems to have much of a problem with 29 miners who died because of corporate greed, but some nimrod who sticks his cellphone camera under his shirt causes squeals and apologies from the corporate community? A lot of people are badly in need of a pimp-slap, and most of them are wearin

In some states doing something like this could be construed as "sexual relations with a minor" (i.e., yourself). Theoretically, that could land you in jail for 5-10 years and forever be labeled a pedophile.

'Sex' once meant intercourse whereby the female could be impregnated. Now it can mean anything, including petting, phone sex, Internet sex, and sexting using SMS. Someday, it might mean alluding to sex through indirect references such as these. Eventually, it might even mean any arousal of the autonomic nervous system. You may someday get busted for having a wet dream. I am sure that will never happen until, of course, it does happen.

Hate to be a 'kin grammar Nazi but there's a 'kin apostrophe missing there (to indicate missing letters - actually there should be one after as well, but that looks silly and the "g" is usually silent anyway).

As in: "'kin hell, some 'kin perv has sent me a 'kin picture of his 'kin moob! Ugh, its 'kin mingin'!"

If she was creeped out with the picture I could see where they were coming from, but she wasn't.

The puritans strike again!

EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY.

T.H. White knew it. People who cannot accept pluralism will always despise that which is Other. The only cure is exposure to different cultures early and often. Exposure in an engaging way - not just the Museum of Tolerance method.

Vast portions of the population of the United States of America are huddled clumps of self-confirming societies. Anything that contradicts whatever crazy thing they decide to believe becomes criminal, and everything else is required to be par